Tag Archive for: climat emergency

Archipelago | Monique Roffey

Inspired by the flooding of her brother’s house in Trinidad in 2008, British-Trinidadian Monique Roffey’s novel is an immersive account of a father’s flight to the Galapagos after a catastrophic flood kills his infant son. With its sharp insights into the legacy of colonialism and the havoc wreaked by a warming planet, Archipelago is both a love letter to the quixotic Caribbean Sea and an electrifying portrayal of life lived on the front line of the climate and ecological emergency.

‘There’s a warmth to this book, an exuberance and a wisdom, that makes the experience of reading it feel not just pleasurable but somehow instructive. It’s funny, sometimes bitingly poignant. A brilliant piece of storytelling.” — Andrew Miller, author of Pure, winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2011.

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section’s

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The Lamentations of Zeno | Ilija Trojanow

Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist.

Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career.

Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world. The Lamentations of Zeno is an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer.

Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative.

It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age – perhaps of our entire history as a species – from an impassioned human angle.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section